It’s DVDuesday, as they say on G4-TV’s Attack of the Show! Today is the release date for Disney’s John Carter, the movie adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s science fantasy novel, A Princess of Mars. But don’t just run out and buy the movie—do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of The ’Warp’s special edition of Burroughs’s action-packed tale.
A Princess of Mars features six incredible black-and-white illustrations by artist Eliseu Gouveia (Carmilla, Lorelei: Sects and the City, The Saga of Pandora Zwieback #0) and an introduction by science fiction expert John Gosling.
As for the movie…
It was a $250-million epic that had the power of Disney behind it, a New York Times bestselling author as one of its screenwriters, and the director of Pixar’s mega-successful Finding Nemo and Wall-E at the helm in his first live-action feature. So how could it turn out to be such a turkey at the box office that it got its ass kicked by the Dr. Seuss animated feature The Lorax—in that movie’s second week of release—and then by the Jonah Hill comedy 21 Jump Street the week after that?
Well, terrible marketing decisions were the biggest factor. Dropping the book’s title for the stunningly generic John Carter; director Andrew Stanton’s head-scratching logic was that no boy would go see a movie called A Princess of Mars, and no girl would see a movie called John Carter of Mars. (The title of this post came from a fan on an Internet forum who’d smartly suggested that Disney should have split the difference and called it John Carter and the Princess of Mars, thus giving it an Indiana Jones feel.) Trailers that told you nothing about the story or its setting—apparently after the failure of the animated feature Mars Needs Moms, Disney felt that Mars was a “bad” word to include in a title, so no mention was ever made of the planet that Carter is transported to. Failing to educate the general public that the movie was based on a novel published in 1912, or that the book was written by the creator of Tarzan of the Apes, Burroughs’s most famous character.
It took the fans at the John Carter Files Web site, using all the footage that was available online, to accomplish what Disney’s marketing department seemed incapable of doing: create the kind of trailer that would make John Carter look interesting, and let people unfamiliar with the 100-year-old novel know that Carter’s adventures predated—and inspired—movies like Avatar and Star Wars: Attack of the Clones (both of which the uninformed public loudly complained were being ripped off by Carter):
Looks interesting, doesn’t it? Well, if you’d like to read the source material on which the movie was based, A Princess of Mars is still available for order from brick-and-mortar stores, as well as from retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Or you can buy it directly from the StarWarp Concepts store.
And librarians: As with our YA dark fantasy Blood Feud: The Saga of Pandora Zwieback, Book 1 and our other illustrated classic, Carmilla, A Princess of Mars is distributed by Ingram Book Group, available at a standard discount. If you have an account with Ingram, contact your representative and tell them you want to add StarWarp Concepts titles to your library!
Today is the big-screen debut of the epic fantasy Snow White and the Huntsman, starring Charlize Theron (Prometheus), Kristen Stewart (Twilight), and Chris Hemsworth (The Avengers). There’s been a lot of positive buzz about the film, which (very) loosely adapts “Snow White,” the Brothers Grimm’s classic fairy tale that celebrates its 200th Anniversary this year.
In Lorelei: Sects and the City, what starts out as Lori interrupting an apparent mugging soon escalates into even bigger problems, when she learns that the “muggers” were actually members of a cult that’s attempting to resurrect its ancient gods. And now that Lori has stuck her nose in their business, the cult’s leader wants her to be their next sacrificial offering!
Well, the idea impressed everybody so much that I was hired to write it. I plotted the whole thing and wrote the first three chapters to show what I’d do. Then I sat down with artist Mark Zug (I, Robot: The Illustrated Screenplay, Septimus Heap) and we worked out what Speed & Co. would look like ten years later, as well as the design for a new Mammoth Car (now named Leviathan)—and as you can see from the rough cover design we presented to Speed Racer Enterprises, his final painting was pretty damn impressive.
And if that novel had proceeded, you would have: seen what really became of MJ; been thrilled as Spidey teamed-up with the Cajun X-Man, Gambit, to hunt her “killers” through the Louisiana swamps; and gasped in astonishment as it all tied together with an ancient cult trying to resurrect its dark gods—and an issue of Marvel Team-Up co-starring Red Sonja that you see here. (Only I wouldn’t have been able to mention Sonja by name because the Robert E. Howard estate owns that license.)
Arachne, like Lorelei, was inspired by Vampirella (the outfit should have clued you in immediately), but rather than being a succubus or vampire Arachne (her real name!) was a truck-stop waitress, and the daughter of a superheroine who had recently passed away. The story begins when one of her mother’s old enemies, The Monster Maker, shows up at her job to enact some long-desired revenge…
Now, don’t get excited, I wound up drawing only three pages (as well as badly coloring and lettering a majority of the issue); the balance was completed by John Ruiz (Zwanna’s artist) and Dan Peters (who also colored Heartstopper: The Legend of La Bella Tenebrosa #1, which you can find on our 
Zwanna, Son of Zulu #1 might go down in history as one of the worst comics ever produced—words like “racist,” “sexist,” “embarrassing,” and “homophobic” tended to pop up in reviews when discussing Nabile’s script, in which every white character was either stupid or gay (or both) and outright evil. In hindsight I should’ve turned down the assignment—these days I certainly would—but at the time I was just happy to get paid for coloring and lettering the thing. (Also, I thought the comic was too stupid to ever be taken seriously.) And, of course, there was the continued promise of Arachne becoming Dark Zulu Lies’ first superheroine…
The Saga of Pandora Zwieback #0: Introducing 16-year-old Goth adventuress Pandora Zwieback! Pan is a girl with the ability to see the monsters that regular humans can’t, and with the help of a 400-year-old monster hunter named Sebastienne “Annie” Mazarin, she’s going to protect the world from danger—and maybe even have some fun while doing it.
Heartstopper: The Legend of La Bella Tenebrosa #1: In 1994, Sebastienne Mazarin made her debut in this short-lived Mature Readers series from Millennium Publications. Now, for the first time in almost two decades, StarWarp Concepts re-presents this long-lost comics adventure of the monster hunter known as La Bella Tenebrosa (“the beautiful dark one”).
A little after noon, The Dome and Kriana of the weekly podcast Sci-Fi Saturday Night stopped to say hi. I’d done an
Shortly after that, a fan named John arrived, to ask that I sign his omnibus copy of the X-Men: The Chaos Engine novel trilogy that I wrote a decade ago. (Sorry about the slightly blurry cell-phone shot, John!) He came back on Sunday for me to sign his Pandora comic.
Saturday ended with a visit from 
No events to show
